Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss
When you live in a country where 2 million people have had their phone lines disconnected because of an inability to pay even for the most basic telecommunications, where the cost of broadband (or as we like to call it “fraudband”) is 1000% more expensive than similar services elsewhere and where the newly appointed CEO of the government sponsored monopoly says in an interview :
I don’t buy the issue around our costs being appalling
Then it’s time for someone to do something.
Ivy? Roy? Are you there? ICASA? Anyone willing to do something? Anyone at all?
Overachiever
You know Trevor Manuel must get some smug satsifaction being an overachiever. Under his tutelage SARS has become one the most, if not the most, effective departments in all of government. Now with some new legislation about to be added to the Tax Act he will turn SARS into money hunting terminators from the future.
This is however actually something to look forward to. Sure we all tremble at the thought of stern faced, suit wearing automatons knocking at the front door wanting to enquire about those unit trusts we didn’t declare on our IT3 forms but with their increased collection abilities we can expect further income tax cuts in the future.
So uh… yay SARS!
Disappearing Targets
The HSRC have released a report critical of government for slow service delivery. Now slow service delivery is nothing new, what is alarming is the HSRC raising the issue of targets being set and then silently dropped when it’s clear they can’t be met.
This could backfire on the ANC quite a bit (if it isn’t backfiring already). The news has been full of reports of civil unrest as people wait for houses that were once promised but have not arrived.
And it’s not even things like housing which take some time to organise. Cheap internet access for school’s, something that was supposed to have materialised a while ago and which is not difficult to implement, has yet to actually happen.